Creative Style

[Peter_S.]

Let's try Creative Style to enjoy your camera more, finishing up your photograph with your desired atmosphere. Simply learning to use Creative Style will widely enhance your photographic expression.

What is Creative Style?

Creative Style is the function to provide image styles preset in the camera for your photographic and artistic goals. Depending on the models, 6 to 13 styles such as [Landscape] and [Sunset] are available, and they can be used in the P/A/S/M-modes.
With digital images, you can give different impressions to the same subject by controlling various parameters in the camera, such as tones and depth of colour, brightness, contrast and sharpness.
Creative Style allows you to easily finish the image just as desired by keeping the optimal balance in these various parameters.
Just select the style suitable for the theme or scene you want to express, and the flexibility of your photographic expression will be greatly expanded. Furthermore, this special function even lets you enjoy adding your own artistic intention based on the selected style.



Photograph [1], shot with the [Vivid] style, has a crisp finish with more vivid colours and impact. In photograph [2], shot with the [Sunset] style, the red tint of the sunset scene is rendered more impressively.
In this way, Creative Style is one of the application functions with which the camera accommodates what the photographer wants in the shots. When you cannot get the desired atmosphere in your shots, try different styles in Creative Style. If you find your favourite style, using it as the standard style of your camera may be interesting, giving its own characteristic to the camera.

 

How is it different from Scene Selection?

Creative Style is a function to adjust the finish of the image according to your preference, while Scene Selection is the auto shooting mode which automatically determines the optimal parameters such as the aperture and shutter speed suitable for the selected scene, as well as the way the image is processed. As Scene Selection is one of the auto shooting modes, you cannot change the settings of Creative Style.

The differences between Creative Style and Scene Selection are as follows.

Scene Selection (shooting mode):

The camera automatically controls most settings, including the aperture and shutter speed. As the settings are made according to the selected scene, you can easily take beautiful photographs just by leaving everything to the camera.

Creative Style function:

This function allows you to control the finish of the image according to scenes or your intention. It is available in the P/A/S/M-modes, and completely independent of the aperture, shutter speed and white balance control. You can select image styles suitable for your artistic intention as well as scenes. In addition, you can adjust the parameters for the finish of the image according to your preference.

Examples and comparison of Creative Style

The following shows the image styles available in Creative Style and their features. Although the styles preset in the camera vary depending on the model, the following 6 styles are the most basic ones.

[Standard] This is the standard image style of α. The settings such as colour tones, colour depth (saturation) and contrast are adjusted to suit a wide range of subjects and scenes. It is useful for snapshots, shooting various subjects quickly and casually.	[Vivid] With the higher saturation and contrast settings, you can obtain a crisper finish with more impact compared with the [Standard] style. As well as being useful for giving more impression to colourful subjects and scenes, this style can render colours more vividly even when the image looks too pale in high key photography, or when the subject looks dull in a cloudy situation.	[Portrait] This style reproduces natural skin tones of women and children. Moreover, to reproduce the skin texture more softly and smoothly, it uses the contrast and sharpness settings suitable for portraits.
[Landscape] This style captures a blue sky and green trees with more impressive tones. Also, with the higher sharpness setting, it renders both near and distant scenery clearly. As the contrast and saturation are also high, it gives a crisp feel to the entire image. It is suitable for not only nature photographs such as a blue sky, sea and mountains, but also subjects with a blue sky as the background.	[Sunset] This style reproduces scenes with a red tint such as sunsets and sunrises more impressively. As the red tint is kept with the white balance control, the colour tones and atmosphere remain extremely natural. It also uses the higher sharpness setting to render distant scenery clearly. Furthermore, if you use this style to shoot people illuminated by the sunset, you can enjoy a different mood from the [Portrait] style.	[Black & White] With this style, you can enjoy the appeal of monochrome, making the subject stand out dramatically by eliminating colour information. Rich gradation from highlight to shadow is beautifully created with the contrast and other settings suitable for monotone. This style is also recommended for scenes you want to give a documentary feel to, such as news photographs.

Fine-Tuning

In Creative Style, you can fine-tune the preset styles. Three parameters, Sharpness, Contrast and Saturation, can be changed with ± 3 steps. Use this feature for final adjustment to finish up your photographs.


Photograph [1] was shot with Creative Style set to [Landscape]. Based on this, Contrast and Saturation were adjusted to the + side in photograph [2]. Although this photograph finished up more vivid with strong impact, you should be careful not to adjust too much as it may result in an unnatural finish.